As the 2015 NBA Basketball season gets underway, I wanted to take a moment to recount three of my favorite basketball uniform design stories.

One of the first stories about uniform design I remember reading had something to do with the 1988 debut of the Charlotte Hornets‘ purple pinstripe uniforms. They were designed by Charlotte native, Alexander Julian. With his line, Colours by Alexander Julian, he ably updated the staid men’s suiting routine for then modern times (cue: “This is the nineties.”) by adding splashy patterns and bold color combinations. One such colour — ahem color — for which Mr. Julian is owed a lot of credit: Teal.

Forgive my serious digression. It suffices that there could be an entire post, if not a blog, devoted to teal uniforms. So, Alexander Julian injected teal into sports. He also incorporated a wide-as-clapboard-pinstripe in the befuddlingly unlucky color purple.

He once famously quipped, “When it came out, I felt like I had dropped a teal bomb on Charlotte. There was a new housing development that changed its name to ‘Teal Acres.’ The Park Hotel, which was the best hotel in town, changed its logo to teal. The towels were embroidered in teal. I felt a little like Doctor Frankenstein. I had created a monster. It took off like crazy.”

Love it or hate it, there’s no denying the magnitude of Mr. Julian’s contributions to the way athletes look off but especially on the court.

Sidenote: Tell me I wasn’t the only kid who tore this Converse ad out of SI For Kids and shoved it in his TrapperKeeper.

FLOJO! Look on any “most-stylish athlete” list, and you’re bound to find Florence Griffith Joyner, the track athlete who stormed the courses of the Los Angeles and Seoul Olympics in the 1980s. As famous for her flamboyant nail art and her asymmetrical leggings as she was for her speed, around the time FloJo’s racing career peaked, a tuned-in intern at the Indiana Pacers made note of a Sports Illustratedinterview where FloJo hinted she’d like to try her hand at designing.

Though admittedly far more staid than her one-legged lacy racewear, Knick-killerReggie Miller and the 1990 Indiana Pacers did step onto the courts in bold, asymmetrical uniforms befitting their team’s newfound edginess, thanks in large part to the ball-handling skills of Mr. Miller. Undoubtedly, that edgy flair of FloJo also must have helped.

And finally, the most heart-warming uniform design story in recent years has to do with the work Brooklyn-based Doubleday and Cartwright are doing for the Milwaukee Bucks. A personal design hero of mine, Justin Thomas Kay, a proud Cream City native, was the managing creative director at Doubleday and Cartwrightwhile the firm worked with the Bucks to devise a new logo, new uniforms, and an entirely new design ethos.

What I loved most about this project was how history and childhood were integrated into the design. Milwaukee is known as The Cream City for the color of the bricks made from clay found in Milwaukee and the Menomenee River Valley.

I’m having trouble tracking down the photo, but I recall upon release of this new design seeing a sketch of the lettering above. It was designed using graph paper, the same graph paper on which my friends and I — and assuredly Mr. Kay’s friends — were sketching the logos of the Bucks and Bulls, perfecting the rack of horns or the Bulls’ snout as kids who were obsessed with Detlef and Reggie; and Mugsy and Larry; and Ricky and Alvin; and Scottie and Michael.

By relying upon colors familiar to the woodland Wisconsinites, forest green and cream, with hints of lake water blue, the he uniforms have at once a classic, old world appeal and a decidedly modern look. Kudos to Kay and the team at Doubleday and Cartwright for getting this so very right.

I’m hopeful this NBA season is a good one. Thanks to the Bucks, it certainly looks that way.

There are any number of adages about walking in another man’s shoes one could apply as a means of introducing the story of Willie Nelson’s New Balance shoes. I assure you Mr. Nelson himself has a handful of lyrics that would lend themselves nicely to such an introduction. Instead, I’d like to begin by explaining how I came upon this post.

My twin uncles Mark and Matt were two of the first guys I idolized as a little kid. My dad’s younger brothers were cool. Artists with a passion for hunting elk, there’s this story they tell of Hank Williams, Jr. offering to buy one of their bronze statues of an elk or of a cowboy on a bucking bronco or something like that. My first memories of Willie Nelson are wrapped around hearing his voice pour forth from factory-issued speakers while my legs dangled from the front bench of one of my uncles’ pick-up trucks.

Since then, Mr. Nelson’s music has been a part of mine and my family’s life — a part I largely disregarded until I re-discovered his brilliant songs in early adulthood.

Then there’s the running. Growing up, I recall sneaking around in my dad’s closet and finding this old pair of blue New Balance 320s which he told me he wore when he ran 5ks and 10ks in the 1970s. Around the time of my dad’s running exploits, Willie Nelson left Nashville in a cloud of dust (among other things) and returned to his home state of Texas, and threw his sizable, embellished ten-gallon-hat into the ring of the burgeoning singer-songwriter movement beginning to crest there. And underway was this massive running boom. The hippies were hitting the trails with nothing but a bandana around their heads, some fitted shorts and simple, synthetic and leather shoes on their feet. And with a relentless tour schedule (Mr. Nelson has a song about it. Maybe you’ve heard it.) taking its toll, Willie Nelson found running — or perhaps better stated, running found Willie Nelson.

“For a health kick, I ain’t on one. But… I find that running makes me feel better. It had gotten to the point where I was killing myself at night, so I had to do something in the daytime to make up for it. Now that I run, I don’t stay out as late as I did. I don’t drink much anymore, and I don’t even smoke cigarettes…. It’s not that I’m all that strong willed. It’s just that when you’re done running five miles you don’t want a drink or cigarette. All you want to do is flatten out,” courtesy of Texas Girl, December, 1979.

“More than once, I’ve gone jogging in a town I don’t know and had to knock on a stranger’s door and ask directions to get back to where I started.” from the Tao of Willie.

Running became such an integral part of Mr. Nelson’s life that he began to run races. For a time, at his Pedernales Country Club outside Austin, he hosted the “Willie Nelson Distance Classic.” I was lucky enough to find a vintage t-shirt online from the race that was held in June of 1980. According to one source at the time, “More than 1,000 runners entered the race which Nelson hopes to make an annual event. Nelson (47) finished the hilly 6.2 mile course in one hour, seven minutes and 45 seconds.”

And I’m surprised his running/golf hybrid game has not as yet taken off.

“Willie is very big on fitness and the fact that he is still putting in the miles on the road and working around the clock lends some fact to this. He used to enter road races and I’m not sure if he invented a golf game for fitness folks, but it is different than the one we watch on television. The winner is the person that can run 18 holes the fastest and by adding the number of strokes and the running time determines the winner. Fastest runner with the fewest strokes is the winner and gets to buy the beer.” from Moe Johnson of the San Marcos Record.

And earlier in the year, I reached out with some questions to the folks at New Balance, who were kind enough to humor me with the following statement.

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We make them at our Lawrence, Massachusetts manufacturing facility. We knew Willie was a New Balance fan so when we were presented with the chance to work with him on a running event in Austin, Texas with one of our retailers to benefit Farm Aid – it was a great opportunity. I believe it might have also been timed to our newfound ability to do personalized embroidery at our factory in Lawrence when we added new machinery – which was around that same time. Our manufacturing team members have enjoyed making Willie his 496 New Balance shoes and over the years have added different special embroidery elements on them such as a guitar or his name or Farm Aid. – Amy Dow, New Balance

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Thanks to Ms. Dow at New Balance, to Linda Lee Banks, the author of the authoritative Willie Nelson fan site, Still is Still Moving, to my good friend Adam Geremia, author of the inspiring Tumblr which explores that early running boom, They Call Us The Seekers, and to those of you who found your way to the end of this lengthy headlong dive into the world of Willie Nelson’s footwear choice. I saw this as something of a tribute to this year’s running of the Boston Marathon and to Mr. Nelson as he approaches his 81st birthday at the end of this month. If you’re still hungry for more, there are plenty of photos in this Flickr album that didn’t make the cut. Let’s end it with some inspiring thoughts from the man himself.

“I just try to exercise. I try to do enough in the morning to make up for what I did, detrimentally, the night before. I try to make it even out, but you know, we don’t live the greatest lifestyles out here traveling on the road and eating whatever we can get a hold of. So, any kind of exercise we can do daily is good, and I try to get in a run or a bike ride or something every day.”

“I enjoy running around Austin. I enjoy going downtown and running on the rivers and lakes down there, and you see just loads and loads of people doing it every single day. There’s not a more beautiful place to run and Austin has so many great roads and trails.” – Willie Nelson, courtesy of Still is Still Moving.

Thanks to the National Film Preservation Foundation, I discovered a 1935 reprint of the original 1920 film, “Birth of a Hat” an industrial short about, and sponsored by, the John B. Stetson Company.

From the press materials: “Within ten years of its founding, Stetson developed the widely popular ‘Boss of the Plains’ hat, the inaugural model of the now-traditional cowboy hat. By the early 1900s, Stetson hats were the most popular in the American Southwest, and the company operated the largest hat factory in the world, with 5,400 employees, in Philadelphia.”

One Trip Pass‘ Jay Carroll — the King of the Road Trip — has created a series of videos centered on the work he’s done for Levi’s, traveling and buying up some of his favorite things to be sold in their stores. If dreams were realities, Jay would continue to travel and document these terrific people and their lives’ work forever.

Friends of mine, David Hernandez and Tereasa Surratt, husband and wife/father and mother/web developer/author/and superstar ad folks, have added a new slash to their already impressive list of titles: Shopkeep.

Their Camp Wandawega in Elkhorn, Wisconsin might be recognizable to you, as virtually every clothing company and editorial publication in the United States have used their well-appointed, idyllic summer camp setting to sell you on their version of The Endless Summer.[Read more…]